Completely forgot to update this. Sorry. Posting two (LONG) chapters to hopefully make it up to you guys :)


Part Two: We're Not the Bad Guys

Nearly three hours later, she and Hector are standing outside the med room, observing the kid. He's still grotesquely swollen, broken in so many places, but he seems slightly better now than earlier.

She takes a sip of her coffee. It's two o'clock, and it seems like the deeper the night goes, the more she regrets her decision to do this. "This is your fault."

Hector smirks wearily. "How? You're the one who told me to do this."

"You should have stopped me."

"The kid was dying. I'm a doctor. What do you think my first instinct would be?"

"Why do you always blame your genes?"

"Because they do determine what I do. For the most part. I'm programmed to be this way."

You get on my nerves, she thinks disdainfully but doesn't say. A long moment of silence passes them by before she speaks again. "Any idea on who he is yet?"

He shakes his head. "He looks somewhat familiar, but it's really impossible to ID him right now. His face is like a jumbo chocolate marshmallow with a face drawn on it. I doubt even the people who knows him would recognize him."

She glares at him. A jumbo chocolate marshmallow with a face drawn on it? "You're horrible sometimes, you know."

He only shrugs.

Her thoughts from earlier come back with the silence, this time in a calmer manner. Who is this unwanted visitor? Even the best of the best of the best of the superheroes hasn't cracked their location yet. How did he find them?

And he said he didn't know where else to go, like this is home or his only place of refuge. Through the five years of her reign as the queen of the villains, she's never met a follower who's as young as he is. Those rude little upstarts are way too arrogant to even acknowledge her.

So why did he say that? That he didn't know where else to go? "How do we find out who he is?" she mutters to herself.

"Well, we can wait until he wakes up tomorrow, but I wouldn't count on him giving us information." He looks at her and finds her frowning at him. "…and of course you weren't talking to me. Sorry."

"Why won't he be able to give us information? You think he's a spy sent to us?"

"Uh, I think his brain might be a little too busted to give us any important information." When he sees her frown deepen, he explains, "To be honest, I don't know that he's out of the danger zone quite yet. I got to him just in time, but…he was beaten up so badly. They didn't want this kid to live and to be honest, I don't know that I can do much of anything to keep this kid alive."

They didn't want this kid to live. Bridget knows she's a villain, the worst of all, but the people who did this to this kid? They're just plain animals. He's so young and defenseless. How could they do this to him?

"Stalker," she calls out.

They hear a whisper of whirring coming from down the hall. Zzzzt, zzzt, zzzzt. Then, she feels a burst of chilly, damp air behind her.

"Find out what happened to this young man—but don't tell the others," she commands him.

Stalker's eyes shine bright silver within the sculpture of black smoke that he is. He tilts his head, focusing his sight on the patient for a long minute. Then, with a breath, he collapses as a fog on the ground and creeps towards the front door like a watchful alligator.

Once he's gone, Hector shivers. "Don't you ever get bothered by that thing? He's literally a walking horror movie."

"It's late. I'm going to bed," Bridget says, walking away from their visitor. "You go to bed, too."

"I don't have the same luxury as you! I can't sleep if you want him alive!"

His response echoes louder in the silence. She thinks he sighed and muttered something under his breath, but she doesn't address it. He probably complained about her being selfish or heartless for assigning him to doctor duties he didn't sign up for. He won't be wrong.

But she doesn't admit to him or to herself that the real reason why she can't stay is because she doesn't want to watch an innocent child die.

"We have a problem."

She has just woken up from a somewhat comfortable five-hour sleep when Hector welcomes her with this news. Still groggy without the boost of her mandatory first cup of coffee, she stares at him with a stare that's a cross between a withering glare and indifference. She takes a sip of her drink, notes how watery the Keurig has made it again, and waits for him to continue.

"I x-rayed the kid all over, right? To make sure I didn't miss anything." Hector pulls out an x-ray image and holds it in front of her. "His right hand. Look at it."

She glares at him. "Congratulations, Doctor. You have an image of a teenage boy's hand," she says. "I'll put it up on our refrigerator."

Hector huffs. He points at the bones, from the humerus down to the metacarpals. "Bionic, components, Ms. I-can't-be-nice-to-you-because-I-didn't-have-my-morning-drugs-yet!"

"Oh, please, Hector. Stop bothering me with this caffeine nonsense."

Hector groans. "Bridget, this kid is bionic!"

The information downloads sluggishly into her brain. She takes another swig of coffee ("ugh, that machine makes the worst coffee for being $200"), and then leans to the left to get a good look at their unexpected visitor.

He's still the same as last night. If she's a bit more optimistic, she'd say that he looks just a smidge bit hopeful. Hector is actually looking more awful than he, but then again her personal doctor has been sleepless. "Has Stalker come back yet?"

Hector narrows his eyes at her, frustrated. "What? I'm telling you this kid came from the hero side, and you're looking for that weird fog machine?"

"I don't want the others to be suspicious because Stalker is not here. You know him. He often gets fascinated with a million little things that he ends up being gone for weeks," she says. She takes another sip of her coffee, and then says, "The others will start asking questions. We don't need them to think that we've opened up the lair to enemies. They'll start thinking I've gone soft."

"Then what are we going to do about him? The kid."

"Send him back?"

"I don't know how safe that will be for him." Hector turns around and watches his patient worriedly. "Three broken ribs, a broken wrist on his right hand, sprained left ankle, potentially damaged left eye, and a big collection of wounds and bruises. Head injury's on the severe side. I'm surprised he wakes up whenever I wake him up. Like I said, he should have died."

He turns to her. "He won't be in any somewhat decent shape for another week or so, if he even gets there. If you want him out, I'm sure we can arrange for something before the others notice him."

Bridget contemplates it. She knows what makes sense: send the kid somewhere else and let the consequences of whatever happened to him play out. But I'm not that kind of monster, she thinks. "No surveillance equipment on him?"

Hector shakes his head. "I don't think his bionics are even active. Just to be sure, I attached one of our signal dampener into his cast, but..."

Her head tilts in thought. "A bionic kid but only partially. Left powerless and left for dead. Now which of those little pests did we end up with?" Curiosity piqued, she turns around, her cape whooshing in her tow. "Go to sleep, Hector. You look horrible," she says as she walks away.

"But who's going to look after him?" he calls back.

She takes a bigger gulp of her coffee then says, "I'd take the offer before I change my mind!" Then, she vanishes into the Corona Alpha to do a little research on their visitor.


SUPERHERO DATABASE

ADVANCED SEARCH

NAME:

GENDER: MALE

AGE:

AGE RANGE: 17-27

RACE: HUMAN

ETHNICITY: AFRICAN-AMERICAN

CATEGORY: BIONIC

CATEGORY KEY WORDS: LIMITED BIONICS; RIGHT

ALIGNMENT: HERO

ABILITIES:

TEAM AFFILIATION:

AREA LAST SEEN:

SEARCH

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.

.

.

.

.

(This might take a moment…)

.

.

.

.

.

.

ONE RESULT FOUND

Leo Dooley

M

21 YO

Human

Bionic

Hero

3 Known Abilities [OPEN?]

+ super strength

+ laser sphere generation

+ kinetic absorption

Layton, UT – 6:32 PM

SPECIAL NOTE [OPEN?]

Person above has been reported missing 12H ago.


She's there when Hector wakes him up later that afternoon. After her research, she's got a plethora of questions for him. Mostly, though, she's mad.

She knows no one is to blame for the choice she made. He's here in the sanctuary she's worked hard to keep secret because she was still too tender at heart.

She guesses Rampage, Cyanide, and Elegy will have every right to be mad if they find out about this. She just had to rescue a puppy off the streets. She just had to nurse it back to health.

The kid's eyes flicker open. His eyes wander languidly around the room before settling at the face of the person he's become familiar with.

Hector glances cautiously at Bridget before giving his patient a consolatory smile. "Hello."

The kid swallows. It's easy to see that that had been painful to do. "Hi," he replies with a hoarse voice.

"How are you feeling?"

"Okay." He winces as he shifts. "Everything…still hurts."

"You're not going to feel better for a while, I'm afraid," Hector says.

"What…happened to me?"

"I don't know. That's what we're trying to find out." Hector glances at Bridget once again, waiting for her signal. When she nods at him, he continues, "Do you know where you are?"

The kid slowly, carefully looks around his immediate perimeter. "The hospital?"

"Okay, but do you know which city?"

He thinks about it a moment. "Mission Creek?"

"Are you sure?" Bridget asks coldly.

The young patient carefully turns to look at her. "I've never been anywhere else."

Liar, Bridget thinks. A terrible one at that. Any normal person can see from the information about him that turns up online that he's been to many places.

For a spy, he's hopelessly horrible.

"Where's my mom?" he asks Hector.

"Why did you come here?" Bridget asks, fed up with the charade.

The kid only looks at her in confusion.

Sympathetic to how it must be for him, Hector says, "You sustained a lot of injuries, one of them is a blow to the head," he says. "We just wanted to make sure everything's okay. Do you remember your name?"

He nods minutely. "Leo. Leo Dooley."

"Good. And when were you born?"

"March 16th 1998."

"Good. And what do you last remember?"

He thinks about that longer. "My mom…told me about school. She said my teachers said…I might skip a grade."

"A grade?"

He nods.

"To which one?"

"Maybe eighth."

Hector exchanges a look with Bridget. She's still indignant, but it puzzles her a little that even for a bad lie, this is way too reckless. Reading that, Hector asks, "Leo, how old are you?"

"I'm 11."

The two adults stare in shock. Eleven? It was one thing to lie about the places he's been, but to be so obviously wrong about his age? "What's this?" she demands from Hector.

The doctor sighs. "The other possibility past either and or," he tells her. He comes around and gestures to the hall outside. "Leo," he says to his patient on his way out, "give us a moment, okay, buddy? I'll be right back to explain everything to you."

"Okay."

Once both of them are out, Hector closes the door behind him. His hands come to his hips. "Okay, we have a bigger problem. The kid doesn't remember the last eleven years of his life."

"You never mentioned this earlier," Bridget growls.

"It's because I didn't know! I was almost positive that the kid would die. Once he started getting better, I just thought he'd be brain damaged or something. Amnesia didn't even really come to mind."

"What if he's just faking it so that I don't kill him on the spot?"

Hector considers that. He holds up a finger, and then he peeks into the room. "Hey, bud. Do you happen to know who I am?"

"No."

After a brief moment, Hector nods. "K, thanks." He closes the door again and says to her, "No spikes in his vitals. He's telling the truth."

"Because he hasn't met you."

"He's met Horace Diaz. He would have recognized this face. If he at all remembers, it would've showed."

She hates to admit it, but she believes the kid, too. There's very little about him that turned up on her search, which is either because he's impressively private about his life or because people just didn't care that much about him. Still, as a registered hero on the database, she thinks he would have at least the common sense to be a better liar.

And sure, the kid does look scared – but he looks scared because he's clueless about his location and woke up surrounded by complete strangers.

Hector releases a breath. "Man. What terrible timing. An amnesiac kid stumbles in just when many things are happening. How are you going to handle leading your team of supervillains, figuring out what to do with this guy, and decide on who your successor will be?"

Successor. A smirk slowly pulls on her lips as the answer comes to her. "How old is Rampage?"

"47," Hector responds, watching her warily.

"And how old is Cyanide?"

"39."

"And Elegy's 36, right?"

"Right."

"Hm." She smiles. "Wouldn't you say that the three of them are pretty set on their ways at this point?"

Hector's brows quirk. "Sure?"

Bridgette nods. "Do you know who's easy to teach? Children. Particularly—"

"Oh, man."

"—eleven year old boys."

"I should've known you'd be heading that direction," the doctor mutters. To her he says, "How are you going to make this work? It's not like he doesn't remember anything. He still remembers his mother. He's actually looking for her right now! How are you going to persuade him to join our side when he's still got connections with the good side?"

"Oh, Dr. Diaz. As far as I'm concerned, we're the good side."

Hector rolls his eyes. "Fine, whatever. He's still got connections with the bad side. There. Happy?"

"Oh, thrilled," she says, grinning. She shrugs. "I never did like those Davenport children. They look like the typical entitled rich kids. They seem very snooty and egotistic to me. I don't like it either that they and their father have taken my baby away from me."

"So, what, you're going to take their brother away from them in retaliation? Turn him evil to show them how angry you are about what they did?"

"Oh, please. How mad do you think I am to break up a family?" She grins widely. "All Leo Dooley knows is his mother, and she just happens to be my friend."

Hector narrows his eyes, confused. "How?"

"Oh, all women are friends. Look it up on the internet."

"Bridget." He grabs the doorknob when she starts reaching for it, refusing to let her in. When the villainess looks at him, he says, "Look. If you really do see an advantage from this, if it falls in your plan or even makes you remotely less annoyed by everything and everyone around you, fine – you've got my support. But I'm inclined to warn you that the chances of this blowing up in your face are high. You've been undefeated. What if taking him in and raising him to be your successor end up what kills you?"

Bridget smiles at him. There's only genuine concern in his eyes. She would never admit it, but it's moments like these when she feels grateful to have a friend there with her. "Well, my success rate might be higher if I raise and teach him with someone helping me."

"I don't know if Stalker is even kid-friendly."

"For a doctor, you're incredibly obtuse."

"Of course I'd help you," Hector finally says, "but this is not a puppy we're picking up from the pound. This is a human being, with dormant abilities that could hurt us."

"Not if we teach him to aim it at the bad guys."

"Bridget."

"Hector."

Hector huffs.

Bridget chuckles. "How long until he heals completely?"

"Lots of broken things. I'm estimating, optimistically, very optimistically, about 8 to 12 weeks for full recovery?"

"And his memory, will he gain it back?"

"Hard to tell at this point. What are you going to do if he remembers we're not the good guys?"

"If he doesn't, we get to shape up my next Mr. Terror. If he does, we have a hostage to use as our leverage." She smiles. "I'd say this situation is a win-win for us."

Hector nods, unable to find anymore loopholes in her inane idea.

"So, back to my best friend's son?"

Hector rolls his eyes again then releases the door. As Bridget steps in with a brighter smile and an attitude that's a 180 degree flip from earlier, he hopes that everything will work out as she's planned.